Ashraf's book reworks his doctoral
dissertation under Joseph Rykwert, who pioneered the study of hermit
huts. The Hermit's Hut
addresses not only architecture but philosophy,
religion, culture, and history. The book is a thorough exploration
of key eremitical concepts and practices at the center of the hermit
dwelling, especially in Buddhist India of the 3rd century CE.

The book's chapters provide thematic packages. The narrative is
flexible, usefully weaving context and concepts in and out of the topic
of the moment, building a spiral structure that cumulates insights and
information. The strength of the book is in connecting eremitism and
asceticism. Readers are assured of a richer under- standing of a
frequently overlooked subject.

As the author states in the Introduction:

This book focuses on the ascetic body-hut
as the site and instrument of
demonstrating an existentially reorganized life. Despite the intimacy
indicated between the ascetic and his dwelling, this study also takes
into account the lack of a clear, symmetric relation between the two.
The inseparability between the hermit and his dwelling are both
problematic and challenging. With a domain broader than that of
architectural history, the narrative of the hermit's hut encompasses
phenomenological descriptions, religious ideas, yogic practices,
sociological formation, metaphysical constructs, and fabrication of
home and homelessness.

The book is
organized thusly:

Introduction: The Architecture of
Asceticism
1. Asceticism and Architecture
2. Home in the Ascetic Imagination
3. The Buddha's House
4. The Two Houses: Body and Building in the Ascetic Imagination
5. Asceticism and the Primitive Hut
6. A Hut with Many Meanings
7. The End of Architecture

Notes, glossary, and bibliography provide invaluable resources.
Numerous black and white illustrations highlight huts, stupas, caves,
and statuary of Vedic and Buddhist images to supplement the text. What
follows are summaries of important ideas and observations, chapter by
chapter.

Introduction.

The author opens with the emblematic declaration of the enlightened
Gautama (in the Dhammapada)
that the rafters are shattered, the roof
collapsed, that the house shall not be rebuilt. Thus the equation of
body or self with building or dwelling place is an established theme in
Buddhism. The practitioner will dwell in a temporary transient place:
the ascetic's hut or hermit's hut, "no mere object of reflection but a
metonym of that reflection; the hut stands for how asceticism
structures its intentions and practices."

Earliest Vedic religious fire rituals revolved around open-air
altars. The first structures were rathas or vimanas, shrines based
on huts, as noted by historians such as Albert Foucher and Anada
Coomaraswamy. The hut predates the shrine and temple; it is more
fundamental. The same architectural phenomenon occurs in Buddhism,
specifically from the 3rd century BCE, when images increasingly "depict
the hut with the dweller inside or in front of it, often in a forest
setting," ... with evolution of the relationship of hut and occupant
into codified meaning at literary, visual, and ideational levels. Ashraf
compares the evolution of the Japanese tea hut ( chashitsu) and Mohandas Ghandi's
Wardhu hut to establish cross-cultural functions of huts and their
spiritual identity.

Chapter 1.

The Greek root word for asceticism means labor, and corresponds with
the India srama,
which refers to intensive practices such as meditation and yoga. The
first Indian ascetics appear in late Vedic literary sources as hermits,
shamans, and yogin. A distinction between ascetics and renouncers
arises, the latter as wanderers, monks, and dissenters. The two
groups inevitably overlap, as both separate from conventional
Brahmanic ritual to concentrate on self-potential. In turn,

the ascetic-renunciatory lifeworld
manifests as a polarization between two human types: the householder,
or ghapati, and the
hermit-renouncer, or vaneprasthi.

The householders' civilized and socialized living space in an urban
setting contrasts with the hermits' uncivilized and unsocialized wild
space in the forest. The Vedic and Brahmanic values of ritual
sacrifice, procreation, and study, contrast with Buddhist and Jain
renunciation, which feature celibacy, homelessness, wandering, and
mendicancy. The forest comes to represent what the author calls a
"spatial laboratory" for the new practices and human potentials for
"otherness," a heterotopia. And the chief dwelling place in the forest
is the hut or kuti.

The kuti "was a simple, independent structure, either circular or
rectangular, constructed of forest materials such as large leaves or
woven reeds." Not unlike peasant huts familiar to Brahmanic and
Buddhist practitioners alike, 3rd-century CE art depicts the kuti and
its occupant to represent concepts, not mere dwellings. In earlier
Buddhist literature, trees served as dwellings for dhutanga ascetics,
with the distinctive characteristic of being roofless. Caves were
sanctioned as rain shelters, and once ascribed to the Buddha's approval
were popularized as cave dwellings, eventually as monasteries. Finally, the
vihara or building that houses more than one monk evolved from the
original kuti as the simple residence for a solitary monk. Other larger structures
followed.

Early ascetics held only four necessities: food, clothing, medicine,
and a dwelling-place, the last originally a tree, as mentioned. Gautama having
rejected extreme asceticism, the four necessities established an
important definitional place in complementing Buddhist practice. But
traditional dwellings of forests, trees, mountains, caves, charnal
grounds, and open ground, were influential, leaving the fourth
necessity ambiguous.

Chapter 2.

"Home is both the foundation and, literally, the point of departure
for the ascetic project," notes the author. The Pali term pabbaya and
the Sanskrit pariv rajaka
refer to the aspirant's going forth and
renouncing a key identifier: home. Home is not just an edifice but an
entire "conceptualized and imagined entity structured by and
structuring, on the one hand, an individual's social, economic, and
communal conditions, and, on the other hand, the mythological,
psychological, and oneiric dimensions." The Great Departure and
related tellings form pivotal events in Siddhartha's life story and
affect future hermits following his path, with their ascetic dwellings
becoming both the affirmation and abnegation of the concept of home.
Where Vedic tradition set fire ritual within the domestic dwelling
itself, reinforcing domestic, social, and urban values (grhya), house,
marriage, and sacred fire identified together a symbolic
"being-in-the-world." While some forest-dwellers brought fire and wife
to forest places, ascetics directly rejected grhya, asserting a path
away from home to homelessness, exemplified by wandering. The
Samannaphala Sutta asserts that the ascetic is free to achieve the
perfected life of detachment and mental purity precisely because of his
homelessness.

To pause in wandering to accept or find rainy season shelter evolved
the Buddhist sangha by locating it at a fixed point, at least for a while. The
same monks returning to the same dwelling is the monastery prototype.
But "ascetic homelessness implies a peripatetic existence;" the "bipolar
flux" is a paradox, for the hermit's dwelling is conceived as neither
home nor a place -- perhaps an ambivalence as much as a paradox.

Renunciation and asceticism thus seem to
be caught in a web of disengagement and meditation. What is then seen
as a paradox of ascetic dwelling is perhaps best described as an
osmosis
rather than an antagonism between two parallel systems ...

Chapter 3.

This chapter extends the concept of home specifically to the
Buddhist tradition, taken as an ascetic paragon, product of "the
sustained religious, sociological, and philosophical imagination."

The house is not literal but extends architectural purpose,
identifying the ascetic's body with the building. Dwellings of the
historical Buddha are not described until Jetavana, with iconography
beginning in the 3rd century BCE. Vedic sources have described
pre-Buddhist ascetics and their dwellings, but in a formulaic manner.

The tree as dwelling, Buddhism's first hermit dwelling, evolves from the
yaksa of Vedic sources, basically a tree spirit. The Vinaya texts
assert that the sramana should dwell at the base of a tree. The
Buddha's
post-enlightenment wanderings show him frequenting gardens, then hermit
huts at Jetavana. These huts architecturally define the physical center
of later elaborations of monastical architecture. The arched structure
representing the hut roof is the caitya, which came to be depicted
within a large building or stupa.

The Buddha's personal dwelling came to be called gandha kuti or the
fragrant hut, due to flowers and perfumes offered to him, depicted in the
iconography of the monastic pavilion. The image also represents the
absent Buddha, hence the "house of absence," in turn inspiring votive
stupas (harmika), the design of which is that of "world tree." This design parallels the usnisa or
cranial protrusion seen in statues of the Buddha. The usnisa is an
iconographic device showing the enlightened status of the one depicted.

Chapter 4.

The house or hut, closely identified with the body, is, upon
enlightenment, antimasariram, the "last house" or "last hut." Hence
identification of hut size relates to the body. Iconography of the
Buddha touching the earth links body and nature, a framing of the
body. Ashraf returns to a detailed discussion of the caitya in
architecture and hut framings of the seated Buddha, with artists
challenged by the superasceticism of their subject. A discussion
of the usnisa as "sign of a superman" is aptly illustrated. The author
points to the Vedic image of external fire transferred to Buddhist
imagery as internal fire. This section provides a very useful treatment
of all its subjects.

Chapter 5.

Renunciation and asceticism is construed primitiveness, not
primitivism. The foundational renunciation disengages from society and
civilization, whereas primitivism describes a primordial order from
which a social and cultural evolution progresses. The images of the
fasting Siddhartha, the hair-shorn, and the ragged Siddharta, embrace
the Indic ascetic's primitiveness, which divests itself of "modern
consternation about power and the hegemonic relationships between
societal groups." Romanticized primitivism is not "actualizeable"
asceticism; naturally primitive peoples are not self-conscious. The
hut then is transcendent as well as outwardly primitive. Ashraf's
hierarchy of of hermit huts, therefore, might be presented thusly:

Robinson Crusoe

involuntary

temporary

Henry David Thoreau

voluntary

temporary

Kamo no Chomei

voluntary

permanent

As Ashraf succinctly puts it:

The hermit hut is ... a dwelling at the
social fringe and presents its undeniable and contrived coarseness as a
badge of honor. Like other figures on the social fringe, the
hermit-ascetic defines a certain kind of cultivated estrangement and
alienation but as prerequisite for a larger goal. The ascetic hut is
inhabited by a very particular dweller who, not unlike the escapee or
renegade, is more or less a solitary and self-absorbed creature but
operating from and within a more defined and clearer sense of ideology,
intellection, and purpose. The ascetic has a project: the plan to
transform himself.

The primitive appearance of the Vedic-era kesin or wild man is
echoed by 4th-century Brahmanical Vakhanasas, Jaina
digambara, and the famous Gymnosophists or naked philosophers
contemporary with Alexander the Great, of which Diogenes the Cynic is a
Western counterpart.

Ascetic primitivism intends "the unmediated, unoriginated, or
unconditional." Not contrived or ritualized, it abandons, divests, and
simplifies. The Brahmanic ascetic-renouncers appear regularly in the
Ramayana, and Mahabharata, reaffirming the primitive appearance of the
earliest ascetics. Primitivism, however, is an intermediary point in a
trajectory, a preliminary and provisional stage, a necessary mediation
in the move from a cultivated, socialized life to an ascetic one.

Into this context is found the hut. There is no hermit's hut without
the hermit. Ashraf describes the Lomas Rishi of the Ajivakas ascetics
as an instance of dwelling and symbol, incorporating the architecture
and themes of the hut into elaborate cave dwelling and sculpture. One
hut is the simple kuti, the other a complex caitya, both within
interconnected caves. Other architectural examples are Guntupalli, Kondone, and
Ajanta.

Chapter 6.

This chapter is a deeper exploration of the hut as "metonym of the
ascetic discourse on the dwelling." The "polysemous" hut is the last
hut, the primitive and transient. Buddhism reduced the ritualized
significance of the hut, shifting to the Brahamnic and yogic, from
extrahuman to superhuman (inahapurusa), or even (as Ashraf quotes
Robinson Jeffers), the "transhuman." The hut from dwelling to embodiment
of self, is epitomized in the Japanese chanoyu or tea ritual within a
cosmic or cosmicized hut. The appearance of temples and shrines is a
late valorization of the progression of "interiorization of sacrifice"
and the hut as mirror to the ascetic. The hut further deterritorialized
from forest to imaginary mountain.

Chapter 7.

This chapter summarizes the hut as final dwelling for the
hermit-ascetic. The paradox of the dwelling is the paradox of the
body. Renunciation primitivizes the hut but disciplines the self.
Indeed, asceticism is itself a paradox, both affirming a rigorous path
and acknowledging transience. As such, asceticism is a cultural
inevitability, Ashraf asserts, not merely an existential option. Where Indic thought is
more ambitiously a goal of transformation, Buddhist thought is a
dialogic structure acknowledging constructed binaries and works with
the cultured tensions, thoughtfully and mindfully. The ascetic work
appears at times "precultural, postcultural, anticultural, or
extracultural," notes Ashraf, quoting one of his many sources.

The first hut is redolent with loss, the last hut is emptied because
it only exists when the hermit is present, present on the project.
Buddhist asceticism addresses both loss and anticipation, not as
ideality but experientially and as actualizable. The first and last huts are distinct but complementary. The first
hut is "a discourse on origins," while the last hut presents both a
termination and a beginning.

Conclusion.

The author approaches a complex and nuanced subject with attentive
detail, explanation, context, and solid familiarity with the rich
literature and iconography relevant to a grand historical theme. The
discussion is thorough and insights clearly presented, while offering a
helpful overview of issues and controversies. Above method, however,
Ashraf has performed an invaluable service for anyone interested in
eremitism, offering numerous insights enriching our knowledge,
understanding, and appreciation.